


All That Remains

by EarthquakeCollector



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Future, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Author doesn't know what they're doing, But they DO try, Confusion, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Eventual Relationships, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, F/M, Futuristic NYC Setting, Lots, Office Rivalry, Rey and Poe are siblings, Slow Burn, Tags May Change, Unexplained happenings, kind of??
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-05
Updated: 2019-02-19
Packaged: 2019-10-23 01:12:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17673578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EarthquakeCollector/pseuds/EarthquakeCollector
Summary: 2192 is the year that New York City puts out a public warning regarding strange happenings. With the rise of industry bringing advancements in both science and understanding of the universe, labs inevitably make breakthroughs (and mistakes).All Rey wants is a couple of minutes outside of her own body. She’s been getting more and more attuned to this seemingly magnetic force that’s been pulling her mind to places in her imagination she didn’t even know she could dream up.Rey feels it then. A tug beckoning her forward."Don’t." Something tells her.Every time she will come back to this memory, she will always wish that she had listened.--Rey is a recent college graduate burdened by the strange happenings becoming so common around New York City. When this affliction starts sinking its teeth into her, there will be no lengths too great to bring her back to normal. But for every answer she attains, more questions rise up in their wake. Why does this man Ben Solo know so much about her?





	1. Chapter 1

2192 is the year that New York City puts out a public warning regarding strange happenings. With the rise of industry bringing advancements in both science and understanding of the universe, labs inevitably make breakthroughs (and mistakes).

A facility in Queens rips an interdimensional portal into the earth so large it claims an entire strip mall. There have been northbound trains inexplicably turned southbound on straight lines of track between stations. A pizza chain store in the heart of the Lower East Side with a back room opening to the shadowy underside of the Brooklyn Bridge. A man suddenly understanding his French Bulldog when it begs for food at the kitchen counter of his SoHo apartment. An entire neighborhood in Midtown experiencing a color that they have no name for.

Along fifth avenue, a man falls into an open sewer grate and tumbles out of a locker in the changing room of an NYC Fitness Club.

These anomalies have been increasing in frequency at an alarming rate. New Yorkers mumble nervously during their morning commute about what strange event will touch their life next. What they will do if they wake up one morning to a universe that has so many holes torn through it that its entire being unravels all together. What will happen to them if the city can’t get the state of things under control.

 _Do not be alarmed_ , the city placates in the statement it issues. Plastered all over the news and the internet and deep green construction partitions lining the sidewalks. _Times are changing. We understand the universe better every day._

 

Deep underground aboard a Brooklyn bound F train, Rey tilts her head back against the dark window behind her and allows her eyes to drift shut. It's crowded even from where she sits, with an old woman pressed heavily against her side and a creature she can’t identify against her other. Her takeout bags are clamped between her ankles where they rest under her seat but still crinkle against shoes shuffling to find a comfortable stance. The wheels squeal against the ancient tracks, and somewhere on the car a baby squeals in distress.

All she wants is a couple of minutes outside of her own body, crammed how it is into this subway car. She’s been getting more and more attuned to this seemingly magnetic force that’s been pulling her mind forward, to places in her imagination she didn’t even know she could dream up. Places with glittering glass windows and sweet perfumed air and night skies glistening with constellations she’s never witnessed. Places where she doesn’t have to face the constant unending grind of her everyday life.

She strains her body to the left to keep from leaning into the man next to her as the train halts at the next station. She’s commuting home from her fourth day at the firm she’d just started at. And though the job excites her, being the first decent one she’s landed after graduating college, the unending workload and client emails and firm policies she doesn’t yet understand bombard her late into the night, even deep within her dreams.

Rey’s eyelids squeeze shut a little tighter, willing her mind to spirit her somewhere else for now. Far beyond this car, beyond this train, beyond this city. She casts her imagination out like a net, desperately grasping and sinking for whatever it can catch.

And in her mind’s eye, she sees a vision clearer than she’s ever had.

A sky; an entire endless black night sky. Lit up with tiny glowing pinpricks of light not unlike stars, but swaying gently in the light wind like stationary constellations never could. She’s wrapped within it, not bound as a far off specter from Earth’s surface. Like she could reach out her hand and brush her fingers against them. Like she could feel what it is to touch the stars. It almost seems as if she is weightless in this place, with tendrils of her brown hair escaping from their bindings to float around her face. Unburdened. She feels herself more attuned to this magnetic force than ever.  

Rey feels it then. A tug.

 _Don’t._ Something tells her.

Every time she will come back to this memory, she will always wish that she had listened. That she had let the disembodied voice hold her back against her pale blue plastic bench seat. Instead, she lets herself be pulled forward.

 

Upon eventually exiting the subway, Rey stumbles back home, wide eyed and feeling outside her own body. She clutches her sweater to herself with trembling fingers as she takes the steps to her apartment, slamming the knuckle of her middle finger into the buzzer to find out if Finn has beaten her home. Her teeth are clenched so tightly together her jaw aches.

All around her in the streets, the Lower East Side comes alive on another eventful Thursday night. Couples and groups and stragglers all make their way along the sidewalks, congregating in front of cheap pizza restaurants and trendy bars and apartment building entrances. Laughter and conversation surrounds her, but she hears none of it. The dull ringing in her ears drowning out everything else. Static gathers at the edges of her vision the longer she stares at the buttons lining the console in front of her.

The door pops loudly from its frame and she pries it the rest of the way open to take on the three story walkup. When she makes it to 305, she practically falls in through the door.

“... And how was your day?” Finn asks uneasily as he catches sight of her haunted look. He’s half turned towards her from where he’s boiling pasta, a line creased between his brows as he studies her standing in the open doorway. Rey numbly makes her way into their shared apartment, letting the weighted door swing shut behind her. She makes no move to set down her things, or take off her sweater, or even move once her shoes hit carpet. Hesitantly, she lifts her shaking hands up in front of her face to regard them. She half-remembers something her mother had told her once - about being able to tell reality from a dream just with your hands.    

“Am I really here right now?” she asks him in a quivering voice, and Finn is clicking the stove off immediately. Putting the pasta to the cold back burner and making his way over to her. He gently lifts her bag from across her body and extracts her from her heavy sweater, hanging both neatly on the rack beside the door before taking the takeout bag from her stiff fingers.

“I’ll put on some cocoa.” he tells her after a moment of debate, leading her by the hand to their tiny open kitchen. She feels herself sit down in one of their ancient wrought iron chairs and he is swiftly at the sink dumping the half finished pasta down the garbage disposal with little thought. Their breakfast table wobbles and creaks as she lays her arms down on its surface. It is one of the things that had come with this apartment Finn, Rey, and Rey’s brother Poe rent together. Though Poe thought the table better put to use inside instead of on the tiny balcony they’d found it on. Even if years of cold and rain have made it an irritable rusty piece of furniture.

She stares blankly at the back of Finn's head as he fills the kettle with water.

“Plutt came by again today to complain about our water bill.” Finn tuts in his crisp enunciated way of speaking. “If he doesn’t wanna pay for these things, then he really shouldn’t advertise ‘water included’ in the lease. Don’t you think?”

His attempt at small talk comforts her but does little to shake the stupor she’s found herself in. She feels weightless within herself, as if she neither exists here nor wherever she has found herself. Her vision starts gathering static again until a hefty mug of dark chocolate cocoa is being set delicately down in front of her. She looks at her friend with wide eyes as he gives her a reassuring look and sits across from her with his own steaming cup, already putting it to his lips.

“What is it that’s happened?” he finally asks her.

She takes a deep breath and stares into her own cup, watching as the remaining powder grains chase each other round and round.  

 

When she travels for the first time, the very first thought that Rey has at the sensation of it is that she has simply fallen asleep where she sits. It feels like nodding off and catching herself dropping her head. The moments between dozing and sleep when she jumps awake at the sensation of falling.

Except when she catches herself this time, she is not in her seat on the subway car. She’s not on the F train barreling towards home at all.

Rey blinks with a gasp and finds herself standing in a subway station she’s never seen before. The air feels like it’s sucking her in deeper, the wayward strands of her hair dancing around her face as suddenly, a train is screeching into the station in front of her. She would scream, she would jump back further onto the platform, but she is rooted into place, fear tightening its icy fingers around her limbs. Her ears are ringing so loud she can barely hear, and all around her people and other beings stream off the train bundled in coats and scarves and hats. Brushing passed her frozen form as if she isn’t even there.

_Is she?_

The air is frigid, she realizes. Temperate October breezes replaced by creeping January frost. As the space around her clears and the train reawakens to roll onto its next stop, she frantically searches for something - anything - that will allow her to get her bearings. She had been _in_ a car, not outside of one. This place is no stop that she has ever glimpsed out the windows on her train ride home. She has no idea how she could have gotten here.

Her eyes land on a mosaic - ancient compared to the ones she’s used to. Obviously passed over when the MTA remodeled all major stations forty years ago. Hundreds of tiny blue tiles formed to frame ‘28th ST’ constructed out of white. A small yellow border fencing it all in before the old style subway tiles take over the walls. She racks her brain trying to remember which trains even stop at 28th street. The freezing air sinks its teeth into her arms and she crosses her arms tight over her chest, fingers curling around her biceps, sweater hardly even making a difference against the cold. This place isn’t anywhere along her route. She feels dizzy and disoriented. Like she’s stood up too fast or held her breath too long.

The heavy grounding weight of a coat drapes itself over her shoulders, and Rey is so deep within her panic that she jumps about three feet out of her skin.

“Sorry.” someone says behind her, and she whips around to find a man - tall, with dark hair and strange features - standing behind her with his hands still poised over where her shoulders had been. “I usually see you more prepared than this. Where’s your backpack?”

She stares at him with wide blank eyes, trying to school the panic off of her face. He’s still looking at her, expecting a response to the question she’s already half forgotten. What had he asked her?

“... Or are you really here right now?” he tries again in a quieter voice.

“What?” she breathes sharply, terror liquifying her insides. She finds herself pulling the sport coat tighter around her as she stumbles a step back. Something in his question shakes her to her core, has an icy pit forming in the hollow of her empty stomach. How could she not really be here right now?

She steps back again, and he stays where he is, still regarding her patiently. An eyebrow quirks up towards his hairline. “D-Do I know you from class? I’m sorry, I’m not so good with faces…”

The man’s brows knit together, low over his eyes. He looks a bit too old to be a college student still, but it isn’t outside the realm of possibility. He could have been one of her TAs.

“Are you messing with me again?” he asks her mildly.

She feels the air sucking her in again, feels the slight rumble of the ground as another train comes down the tunnel. She’s getting onto it if it stops. It has to take her somewhere she’ll recognize, anywhere, and she desperately needs to go home and take a nap or something -

She takes another step back without even thinking, but it prompts him to stiffen, to reach out to try and grab her wrist with alarmed eyes.

“Hey, watch-”

It only makes her flinch away further, rushing to step backwards again only for her foot to be met with empty air. She pitches off the platform and into the path of the oncoming train, slamming her eyes shut and screaming as she feels the scorching warmth of it’s lights, the deafening rush of air threatening to suck her under.

She opens her eyes to an entire subway car full of humans and extraterrestrials alike staring at her curiously, screaming in her seat with her takeout bag still clamped between her ankles.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, thank you everyone who commented! It keeps me going, it really does!

_ Blinding sunlight is reflected up from bone colored dunes and back onto the empty colorless sky. The sands stretch for miles all around her - reaching without an end or beginning, pale waves undulating like a pulse the further out she casts her eyes. From where she kneels Rey sinks her hand down into its surface to try to feel it, to prove it a trick of her mind. But her fingers feel a heartbeat. So close to her own in rhythm that she wonders if it is merely her imagination.  _

_ She feels light here. Unburdened by gravity and the weight of her limbs, controlling her motions without quite feeling them in this weightless plane she’s found herself in. So far removed from the physical existence of her body she wonders if she can even call herself a part of it anymore.  _

_ “Come back…” she hears voiced from over her shoulder. She has heard this rich deep cadence before and turns her head to search out it’s owner. But all she finds is the wind, the vessel for a sound she’s already forgotten, brushing itself along the ridges of her cheeks, the slope of her nose, cooling the sweat beading high on her forehead. It is the only touch she can ever remember feeling.  _

_ She opens her eyes again and suddenly it is night. Having descended in the space of a breath, along the exhale of her lungs as if she has birthed this darkness from beneath her breastbone. All around her the stars shimmer and sway, carried in the breeze that flows to the time of her chest rising and falling. She reaches out with her free hand to touch one, surrounded as she is by all this starlight. But before her outstretched fingers can make contact, the sand solidifies. Cementing from grain to mud to rock around the hand she still has within it. Rey crashes back into her body with all the force of comets striking planets as the earth below begins to devour her. Pulling her by the arm deeper into it’s being and consuming her.  _

 

She wakes violently, gasping for air and feeling feverish heat gripping her body down to her bones. She throws her arm over her eyes, struggling to keep her grasp on a dream she hardly remembers much less understands. 

 

Since they share a wall, Finn hears Rey’s phone clatter to the floor when it’s alarm starts blaring. He hears another  _ thump _ as it ceases and sighs. And shaking his head minutely, he spares a thought to the shatter-proof case he’d gifted her last month. 

He keeps on with his mini solderer, working it against the corded mechanisms set deep passed the synthetiskin normally covering his forearm. He has it pulled back now, held open to bear the inner workings of his arm so that he may fix the slight stutter that’s developed in his finer motor movements. He pauses to tick each of the fingers on his left hand against his thumb. That won’t do. He zaps briefly at another taut metallic cord and tries again. Much better. Not functioning good as new, but functioning just fine. 

He unplugs a small cable from just behind his ear to stand, pushing in the chair of his desk as he does, and sets about tidying his makeshift workspace. 

It is only a two bedroom apartment they all share, so he had taken his claim to the odd hexagonal breakfast nook jutting off the far wall of the narrow kitchen, his privacy afforded with heavy floor length red curtains. It is far too compact and misshapen a space for a bed, but considering he is a being that doesn’t require sleep (simply a full battery), he thought it was more than fair for him to be the one to take it. 

It’s a nice room, if he’s being quite honest. New York City hasn’t had much - if any - space to spare in hundreds of years, but he makes it work. The room is just enough to fit its cozy bay window with the lifting bench seat, a desk pushed close against the other smaller window, and a tall skinny bookcase crammed full of his favorite holos. 

He places his tools back into the drawers of his desk and straightens to fold the triangle of synthetiskin back into place, pressing along the edge to seal it back to itself. The intrusion has left no noticeable mark just as always, but he knows if ever he needs another tuneup the skin will peel back along the same line without trouble. 

He nudges the round area rug under his feet back into place at the center of the room and parts the curtains for himself as he steps into the kitchen. 

It’s Tuesday, he knows, he has no work obligations. So he sets about unearthing the toaster pastries Rey is so fond of from the freezer and popping two of them into the toaster. The air of familiarity from a task repeated so many times over smoothes his motions and allows his mind to wander. 

What she had told him last night disturbs him. All around the city he’s overheard frightened conversations about things of this nature. And all around him he’s seen the evidence of a changing world. Extraterrestrials line the sidewalks and the subways and the intergalactic immigration offices. Androids like himself are slowly beginning to earn their rights as citizens instead of possessions. Technology is becoming more advanced than ever before. But these anomalies - these rifts in time and space - they scare him. They scare everybody. 

Rey emerges from the bathroom fully ready a few minutes after her colorful pastry has sprung from the toaster. Already smeared with even more sugar substance, he pushes them over to her on a plate when she sits down at their table once again. 

“Thank you,” she tells him as she starts digging in, and he suddenly notices how awful she looks. Her hair freshly brushed but twisting in odd patterns from her sleep, dark shadows blooming underneath her eyes. As if she has been running within her dreams all night. Or unable to attain them at all. 

“Has Poe messaged you at all?” she asks him almost sheepishly, raking in another bite of her breakfast without meeting his gaze. “Do you know if he’s coming back anytime soon?” 

Finn lets out a breath. “He’s been pretty quiet since he returned.” he says. “I can’t imagine what he must have seen out there, so deep in space. It must be a shock to come back to normal life. As normal as it can be these days, I suppose.” 

Poe had returned from the Hermes IV mission three weeks ago, and had yet to step foot back in the apartment he pays most of the rent for. He’s been holed up in him and Rey’s parents old home out in Queens, apparently on orders to decompress until he got approved to continue his research with NASA. And though Rey hasn’t said much about the matter, Finn knows how much she must miss him. 

Rey twists her lips in a way he recognizes but doesn’t say anything. She rises to gather her things for work before stopping short as her hand grasps the door latch. 

“Wait up for me tonight, okay?” she asks him in a small voice from over her shoulder. And she is out the door before he can even respond. 

  
  


**From: rdameron@resistancearch.com**

**To: ptico2@resistancearch.com**

**Subject: Isolder Account**

Did the Isolder people approve the charge for the layout change to their 2nd st building yet? Are we good to go with moving forward on it yet? 

\--

Rey Dameron

Junior Architect

Resistance Architecture

 

**From: ptico2@resistancearch.com**

**To: rdameron@resistancearch.com**

**Subject: [reply: Isolder Account]**

Not sure. I haven’t heard from them since he sent before we sent in the revisions, actually. But we can’t continue on it until we get the approval for that charge. Have you checked with the accounts dept? 

\--

Paige Tico

Senior Architect

Resistance Architecture

 

**From: rdameron@resistancearch.com**

**To: ptico2@resistancearch.com**

**Subject: [reply: Isolder Account]**

Sorry, I’m still trying to get my bearings a bit. How do I find that out again? And do you know who in accounts is assigned to this?

Thank you for your help.

\--

Rey Dameron

Junior Architect

Resistance Architecture

 

**From: ptico2@resistancearch.com**

**To: rdameron@resistancearch.com**

**Subject: [reply: Isolder Account]**

No prob. Pretty sure it’s Solo. You can check in the Isolder file that’s in the comunal folders. Go shared folders - accounts - isolder - financial, and it should tell you. But if it’s not there, I would shoot an email to Solo. Good luck!

\--

Paige Tico

Senior Architect 

Resistance Architecture

 

Throughout the entire afternoon at work, Rey can’t stop herself from being agitated by the windows. 

When she had first been hired and given a tour of the office, she had been rendered speechless by the sight of them. Monumental floor to ceiling windows stretched along the entire west wall of the spacious room. A whole side of the building apparently made of a single sheet of glass. It lets light pour in unrestrained, streaming along the floor between legs of furniture in rivers, dripping to shine brilliantly off the rims of stray coffee mugs, flooding everything in the office in sunsets orange glow. The Resistance’s office sits so high up in the building that it doesn’t even look directly into anyone’s apartment. 

The sun catches in the corner of her eye as she contemplates her computer screen, and she has to admit to herself that she isn’t used to anything resembling this sort of opulent display of real estate at all. As someone who was born and raised in New York City, viewless windows are fixtures that have become permanent in her life. Her childhood home in Queens surrounded on all sides by others of the same height, her dorm in college facing directly into another, the apartment she shares currently facing the blank face of a brick wall on one side and a perpetually shaded alley on the other. 

This wide as the sky view is foreign to her. No wonder the plants on the far side of the office thrive, curling their limbs around the shelves holding them, their pots, each other. The office, in truth, is the nicest place she’s ever spent any extended amount of time in. 

All forms of rent in New York City are astronomical these days, and many of the nicest buildings the city used to offer have been divided up and converted into apartments. Old museums have had walls erected to house corporate offices, lavish department stores have been cut up and carved out into cubicles, and many large sections of northern Central Park have even been taken over by condos. Countless outdated buildings renovated to accommodate more people in increasingly less space. Floating buildings have even been engineered to cluster and cling to Manhattan at the edges of the East River. 

But this place - with its larger than life windows and spacious open workspaces is practically a monument to days passed. Light wide planked wood lines the floors, the high ducted ceilings painted deep olive green to contrast with the stark white walls descending from them. The desks are relatively spacious: her computer and framed pictures and banana shaped sticky notes fitting with room to spare.

She tries to bring her focus back to her work again, staring at the first floor layout of a building going up in SoHo on her screen when she feels it again - a tug. 

A firm wandering of her mind. A lightness teasing at the slope of her shoulders and gripping around her bones. She grits her teeth and removes her fingers from her keyboard, splaying her hands flat against the white surface of her desk. Fear drops into the pit of her stomach, nauseating her in its intensity as she squeezes her eyes shut and waits. Wills it to pass. To leave her in her seat. To please let this be a one time thing, a strange anomaly the subway caused that never happens to her again. 

The feeling is gone just as soon as it came, and she lets out a breath. Fists her hands so that her fingernails bite into the soft skin of her palm. She is here. She is real in this moment. 

Her eyes wander back up to her monitor and the red haze of the sunset burns at the edges of her vision. 

 

Rey makes it home that night blessedly untouched by trouble. She pushes in the front door, and the first thing she notices upon entering is an envelope sitting on the edge of the kitchen counter. She regards it curiously, picking it up as she deposits her purse to study it. She tries to remember the last time she even saw one of these postmarked and everything, a federal sticker in the upper righthand corner exempting it from payment. Of course it’s addressed to her brother, stamped with NYC NASA’s official seal in metallic ink along the back. 

She finds herself tearing it open without a single thought.

“That’s illegal…” Finn sing songs absentmindedly from where he’s sitting on the couch, and she waves the letter at him dismissively when she pulls it from the envelope. Only important or highly official business is ever conducted through snail mail anymore. 

 

Poe,

On behalf of all of us here at NYC NASA, welcome back to Earth! We want to thank you for your service as a member of the Hermes IV mission, and your invaluable work towards our continued effort to better explore and understand the universe. We hope you are settling back into civilian life comfortably. We understand how difficult it can be to accomplish this, and we therefore grant your request for extended vacation time with no hesitation! Just as a reminder, we offer no cost reassimilation counseling services at the NYC administrative offices located in the Upper West Side. If you’re interested, all you need to do is make an appointment through the online portal. Let us know when you feel comfortable continuing your research at your office in the main Extraterrestrial Sciences building at 221 W 21st Street. 

Best regards, 

The NYC Branch of the NASA Team

 

“Finn?” she asks distantly as her brows slowly begin to draw together. 

His only response is to look up at her from the datapad in his hands. Rey holds the letter towards him as if the piece of paper has personally betrayed her.  “Did you know about this? That Poe asked for Vacation time?” 

“I wasn’t aware, no.” he replies as he sets his datapad facedown on the coffee table. 

“Has he talked to you at  _ all _ ?” 

“Not that much, really.” he admits. 

He had told her that NASA required a certain amount of down time after his mission before being allowed to return to work. He had told her that he was staying at their parent’s old house because he’d been ordered to assimilate back slowly. She can’t think of why he would have lied to her about this. 

Rey makes a sour face and slaps the letter back onto the counter face down. She takes a minute to think. 

“I’m skipping my lunch break tomorrow so I can get out at four. You meet me at the Sutphin Boulevard station tomorrow after you get off work, alright?” 

  
  


**From: rdameron@resistancearch.com**

**To: bsolo@resistancearch.com**

**Subject: Isolder Account**

Hi Mr. Solo,

I’m one of the architects on the Isolder account. We’re working on the revised layout for their 2nd st building, and I wasn’t sure if they’d approved the charges for the reworking we’ve done. I was told that you were the financial manager in charge of their account. 

Thank you for your help.

Rey 

\--

Rey Dameron

Junior Architect

Resistance

  
  


Finn meets her outside of the Sutphin Boulevard station just as he’d agreed, and they both begin along the path to her parent’s old home. It is a walk that Finn has made many times. Back and forth, rain and sun, winter and summer.  _ Take Finn with you! _ their parent’s used to shout after the siblings as they bounded out the door towards the subway that would take them into the city.

He glances over at her now and remembers those days. Of a Rey that barely came up to his bicep, grasping his hand with her small fingers as they crossed the street, begging him  _ please please  _ please _ may we go to the Brooklyn Bridge today? _

_ And what would your mother say? _ He’d ask her as a smile pinned his lips and gave him away. 

And Rey would lisp through her missing front teeth, repeating back the phrase her mother always told Finn with mirth evident in her tone:  _ She’d say she configured your hard drive for a  _ reason _!  _

She would laugh and laugh in that shrill young voice of hers, tugging on his hand until he would acquiesce and let himself be dragged down into the subway.

“I’m worried about him.” she tells Finn now, pulling him out of his memories and drawing him back to the task at hand. The air around them is getting colder every day as winter draws upon New York, and he sees her slip her hands into the pockets of her jacket from the corner of his eye. The wind whips at both of their hair as they cross another street. 

“I know.” he tells her, thinking back to all the messages Poe has read and left unanswered. “I am, too.” 

They continue in silence after that, each ensnared too deeply within their own thoughts to give them voice. 

It has been years since Rey has set foot in this neighborhood. And he knows how much it must haunt her. All around her are relics to her childhood, and not for the first time, the enormity of what she has lost squeezes at his circuits. Finn remembers sitting on their front steps to watch her ride her bike back and forth along the vacant roads. He remembers holding a tablet to the sky as her father told her their stories, their paths lighting up across the screen. He remembers programing the circadian rhythms of the nightlight plugged at her bedside, and pouring her juice when the jug was still too heavy, and watching her mother hold her tight as she cried about a scraped knee. Shara tucking a stray strand of her mussed brown hair behind her ear, cooing words he could not pick out into her tiny ear. 

_ “Finn!” she said to him in that high singsong voice of hers, fisting her little hands into his shirtsleeve and dropping her weight and marveling how he needn't strain to keep her from falling to the ground. “Mommy’s making dinner tonight. Do you smell it?”  _

_ He did. Or his olfactory receptors picked up on it, anyway. Chicken Parmesan.  _

_ “Of course, peanut,” he told her as he used the arm she clung to to completely lift her off her feet.  _

_ She shrieked with joy, kicking her dangling feet.  _

_ “She’s making it because she said you can’t cook!” she’d tacked on with unrestrained laughter.  _

_ He’d made a face, but swung her around so he caught her around her middle and hoisted her up onto his shoulders. “Ask your mother why she built an android if she was going to insist she do everything anyway?” he tells Rey loud enough for Shara to hear in the kitchen.  _

_ “I heard that,” Shara shouts back, “You have access to the internet. You have unlimited recipes and culinary know-how all within your reach instantaneously. Why can’t I teach you how to cook??”  _

But Finn also remembers the day her parents never came back home from work. Sitting with her at fourteen years old waiting for them around a table laden with cooling untouched food.  

When the pair finally makes it to the house, Finn has to make an effort to staunch the flow of his memories. It’s exactly the same as it was ten years ago, with it’s chipping mint green paint and white window sills; the front porch colossal for Queens where it juts out into the miniscule patch of astroturf that makes up the front yard. 

Finn thinks he might hear Rey suck in a breath. 

She starts a path up the steps with him trailing behind her, only stopping after she crosses the porch to reach the wide front door. Rey rings the doorbell, and faintly they can hear it echoing all throughout the old house.  

A moment seems to stretch into two, which stretches into three more. It feels like they stand there waiting for an uncomfortable amount of time, Rey shifting her weight from one foot to the other, checking for her phone in her bag, reaching in again to pull it out and check the time. She sweeps an errant hair out of her face. Then, so suddenly it might have startled anyone else, turns to look at him. She doesn’t say anything at first, just cocks her head slightly to the side. 

“...Do you hear the TV?” she asks him quietly. He listens too, and sure enough he finds himself able to pick out the sound. He tells her as much. And then they both hear it - a slight shuffling noise from inside. 

Finn also hears the doorbell again, except this time it isn’t the handful of dings, but one grating continuous sound. He notices that she has her knuckle pressed to hold down the button this time and warily takes a step back. 

“Okay!” they hear shouted from beyond the door, and only then does Rey let up. 

Then the door is swinging open and swinging shut, depositing Poe on the door mat as his dark irises flit unsurely between both of them. 

“Ha, I wasn’t expecting you,” he tells them by way of explanation, tugging straight the sleeves he has bunched around his elbows. He looks as if he hasn’t slept in days, with brown hair snarled in unruly knots and dark bags hanging from under his eyes. His shirt has a tomato sauce stain towards the collar. His gaze seems far away, even as it trains on each of them. “Kind of a long train ride just to say hi.” 

“Well, we hardly hear anything from you anymore, so I don’t really know what you expected.” Rey tells him bluntly, crossing her arms over her chest to ward off the chill. “... Is it alright if we go inside?” 

“I was kind of hoping to stay out here.” he admits sheepishly, wandering across the porch to stop at the porch swing and drop into it. “I kinda have to admit that I haven’t been getting outdoors as much as I should.” 

She sighs and goes to sit against the painted wood railing, Finn trailing behind. “We’re worried about you.” she tells him, leaning forward from her perch. 

Poe groans and folds his arms. 

“Really, I’m fine. I told you. I’m just on orders to take it easy for a while. I need some time to adjust, I was up for a really long time and I’m still dropping things in mid air instead of putting them down,” he tries to joke. 

It falls flat in the face of what Rey knows he’s keeping from her. “Why did you lie then?” 

His eyebrows come together. “About what?” 

“About these mandated decompression requirements, Poe.” Rey says. “I got the letter about your vacation time request at the apartment. Why didn’t you just tell me?” 

Poe looks away from her and seems to chew on the inside of his cheek. It makes him look like the boy he used to be, with bandage tape covering his knees and fingers, red plastic sunglasses too wide for his face, head perpetually tilted up towards the night sky. A boy afraid of no one and nothing, a boy with dreams bigger than this Earth could contain. 

And now, having attained them, shut back inside his parent’s house. 

“You know we would never have judged you. And that we aren’t doing so now.” Finn offers. 

“I know.” he replies quickly, not meeting his eyes. “I just… didn’t want to deal with it.” 

“Deal with  _ what _ ?” Rey barrels on, clearly hurt. “We’re your family, Poe. We can’t help you if you don’t tell us what’s wrong.” 

“But I don’t need any  _ help _ .” he stresses. “Really. Seriously. I’m fine, I just wanted some extra time to get used to all this gravity again.”

Rey seems to be stuck on what to say next. Finn watches something like indecision play out across her face even as her lips move to form her next words. “You haven’t really talked about what happened on the Hermes IV mission.” she settles on. “Was it difficult for you? Whatever you had to do?” 

The only thing Finn can say that he knows for sure about Hermes IV is that its purpose was originally to study life and conditions in the far off system of Lethe. Poe is under strict orders not to discus much about his work, but from what Finn has been able to gather from the internet, it is possible some aspects may have been politically motivated. And that only ever spells out bad things these days. 

Poe chuckles humorlessly. “Yeah, I guess I haven’t really told you any stories yet.” but he doesn’t go any further than that. He stands from his seat, and it is obvious that he’s had enough of talking. “I’ll be back at the apartment before you know it, okay? Promise.” he envelopes her in a hug that she’s still holding onto even as he pulls away. “Just give me some time, alright?” 

He steps over to Finn then, and gives him a hug as well.

“It was good to see you,” he mentions, giving him a smile that almost reaches his eyes. He makes his way back over to the door. “I left my dinner in the oven, though, so I need to go take care of that, but I’ll be over for dinner sometime soon, yeah?” And with that he disappears back into the house. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Actin' real fishy there, Poe...  
> Stay tuned!!!


	3. Chapter 3

**From: bsolo@resistancearch.com**

**To: rdameron@resistancearch.com**

**Subject: [reply: Isolder Account]**

check the info document in the financial folder the arch dept has on them

\--

Ben Solo

Finance Manager

Resistance Architecture

 

**From: rdameron@resistancearch.com**

**To: bsolo@resistancearch.com**

**Subject: [reply: Isolder Account]**

Hi Mr. Solo,

I apologize, but I’m a little new still. I don’t see the specific information I’m looking for in the document you’ve referred me to. Am I looking in the wrong place, or could you tell me whether or not they’ve signed off on that and I’ll put the updated info in the document?

Thank you,

Rey

\--

Rey Dameron

Junior Architect

Resistance Architecture

 

**From: bsolo@resistancearch.com**

**To: rdameron@resistancearch.com**

**Subject: [reply: Isolder Account]**

it’s there look again

\--

Ben Solo

Finance Manager

Resistance Architecture

  


“Is Poe not coming tonight, either?” Rey asks quietly from her seat at the table. She watches as Finn's eyes unfocus from where he’s grating cheese, pupils roving over something in front of them that only exists within lines of code.

“He’s said it’s a bit too long of a train ride for my cooking at the moment.” he sighs, eyes flickering back down to the task at hand. Rey leans forward to prop her head up in her hands, elbows digging into the wrought iron latticework of the table top as it squeals with the new weight. She supposes she hasn’t done a good enough job keeping the disappointment off of her face, because Finn is immediately adding: “Perhaps tomorrow.”

“Maybe,” she concedes.

She sees Finn set the dish of grated cheese to the side as he leans down to reach into their tiny sliver of an oven. And after a few absentminded minutes of staring off into space, she finds a neat plate of Lasagna set gently before her. Finn claims the other seat with a small portion of his own in hand.

“How has work been?” he starts rather blandly, cutting a tidy corner bite with the side of his fork.

She shrugs over a mouthful. “Fine, really.” she tells him. “Finn, aren’t you worried?”

“No? I know you’re good at what you do.”

“Not about my job, about my brother. I know that he said he was fine, but he wouldn’t even let us into the _house_ .” she points her fork at Finn almost accusingly. “And that man has never used an oven in his _life_. You know that.”

Finn takes another bite to avoid responding, but Rey isn’t dissuaded. “This isn’t like him.” she goes on. “I know that he can’t tell us a lot of the details about what happened on the Hermes IV mission, but something isn’t right. And don’t lie, Finn, I’m positive you must feel the same.”  

“I can’t imagine what he must have seen out there.” Finn tells her without meeting her gaze.

“Neither can I,” she shakes her head slowly. “But something else is going on. I feel it.”

Finn takes a measured bite of the food he doesn’t need to eat as his eyes drift further down to the twisting iron of the tabletop.

“I’ve been trying to message him more often.” He admits. “He hasn’t… really been the same. He hasn’t tried to send me any of the usual internet garbage since he’s gotten back.”

Rey frowns and scrapes her fork against her now empty plate. “I don’t know what to do.” she admits. “He hasn’t been home - he hasn’t even slept in his own bed since he left almost two years ago.”

She slowly gathers up her dishes and stands from the table, rolling her shoulders absently as she turns to take them to the sink.

Finn keeps his eyes trained on his half-finished lasagna, entrenched too deep in the shifting gears of his mind to look up.

Until he hears ceramic shattering against tile. The sound of silverware ringing out among the shards, plastic cup sputtering against the floor. His eyes dart up to find that Rey is nowhere to be seen. As if she had never been there at all.

 

As if by magic, she finds herself standing in the middle of a road, of all places.

It’s a damp foggy night, and bone-deep cold. And though she is positive she's still somewhere within the city, it’s impossible for her to recognize the neighborhood. The lights around her now glow from more places than she’s ever seen. On buildings and within windows, but also streaked along the sides of cars, emanating from within the frames of bikes. Even illuminating the paint lining the street. All of it is so unlike anything she’s ever seen before.

She screams as a taxi rushes by her, taking her hair in the wind and honking a deafening sound she’s never quite heard paired with a vehicle before. Her hands jump up to clap over her ears as more and more cars fly past on either side of her.

Unable to go anywhere, pinned to the spot by parallel rows of streaming traffic, she squeezes her eyes shut and hunches forward, practically folding into herself as she tries to catch her breath.

The lights flicker even behind her eyelids, too brilliant to be unseen.

 

She returns gasping, falling to her knees from where she’s found herself standing back in her kitchen. Rey slams her palms against the tile and heaves, squeezing her eyes shut as she focuses on the pinpricks of pain she can feel against her shins and in the soft nearly numb places on her hands. It means that she’s here. It means that she exists. Solid in this plane, and indisputably real at least in this very moment.

She lets a breath rush from her lungs before slowly looking up with watery eyes. She sees Finn, standing frozen where the kitchen meets the living room, shoes caught in the place tile meets engineered wood, staring at her with wide horrified eyes. Still holding a mini-vac at his side in his stone still grip.   

Rey slowly looks down to where she’s landed and finds the broken remnants of her plate. Crushed under her knees and clutched between numb fingers. She lifts her hands up before her gaze to inspect them again. Solid and real. Weeping red from where the sharp edges of the ceramic has cut into her skin. She attempts to bend her fingers, but the effort to move her tingling digits proves to be too great.

Suddenly, she’s being grasped under her arms by Finn’s iron grip, being lifted off the ground with little strain. Just like when she was four, Rey remembers, and he’d lifted her to sit near the kitchen sink to scrub toddler-safe marker from her skin. He sits her on the nearest counter now, just like so many years ago, and sets about cleaning the mess she’s made without a word.

She thinks that old habits might die hard. That no matter how old she gets, Finn will always look after her like he did as he was first purchased to when she was two. That maybe he will never stop seeing her as the little girl he helped to raise. The girl with choppy bangs she’d cut herself and scraped knees and missing teeth.

_“You’ll be old enough to get these for real some day,” he’d told her as he wiped the shaky black lines from her skin. “You had better not find someone with such an unsteady a hand.” he had stage whispered to her like a secret, mirth lacing his voice._

There is no mirth to be found in him now as he finishes clearing the floor of shards from the plate. Stashing the vac away to empty later as he straightens up to look at her. A long moment passes between them as they make eye contact, neither able to put words passed the grave air that has settled over them. It sucks the breath from her lungs, it makes the vacuum between them feel endless and deep and unbridgeable.

Slowly, as if afraid to startle her, he makes his way to stand before her. Gently tugging her wrists away from her body to examine her shredded hands.

“This isn’t an isolated incident.” he murmurs without raising his eyes. He reaches around her to open the drawer just passed her left thigh, sifting through its contents before producing the packet of antiseptic bandages he keeps in there. “I don’t think that what’s happening to you is confined to the anomaly warnings posted in the subway, Rey.”

“Aftershocks.” she replies hollowly, not knowing if she can find it in her to even believe herself. Strange things happened in the subways all the time. It was where so many of New York City’s anomalies were born and found. Just last month a man had reported entering the Herald Square station only to find himself within Canal Street’s J platform.

“I think you need help.” he tells her carefully, setting to work peeling the backings from the sticky transparent sheets. “Perhaps you could ask the city-”

“No.” she yanks back her hand at that, shying away and eyeing him nervously. Remembering how they had questioned that man, how the news had told her they’d kept him for testing and held him for observation. If traveling once called for a response like that, what would traveling multiple times demand? And outside of the subway system, no less? If this is something that she has mistakenly taken with her, if this is an affliction that refuses to remain hidden where it was created… “I don’t want to involve the city.”

He sighs. And even more slowly than before, takes her hand back to smooth the little plastic sheets over her palm. They adhere like a second skin, molding to the creases in her hand and sealing over the cuts. “You should-”

“I said no, Finn.” she says definitively, a tremor lodged deep in her voice.

Finn purses his lips and is quiet for several minutes as he works on wrapping up her fingers.

“You’re brother, then?” he tries.

  


**From: rdameron@resistancearch.com**

**To: bsolo@resistancearch.com**

**Subject: [reply: Isolder Account]**

Hi Mr. Solo,

I’ve taken anther look and I still don’t see it anywhere in the financial file the arch department has. Could you please forward me the info you have so I can add it in?

\--

Rey Dameron

Junior Architect

Resistance Architecture

  


In the morning, the Regency hotel on Park Avenue is awash with incoming guests. The constant white noise of voices ebbs and flows, streaming around bodies of all kinds, flooding into the elevator bay as guests seek out their rooms, winding like a river to spill out the doors each time they open around a new admittance. A gaggle of businesswomen in matching red blazers, a group of extraterrestrial tourists with containers the size of furniture, a mixed flock of humans and other worldly beings alike attending a convention a few blocks over. All around the spartan sunsoaked lobby individuals cluster together - making plans, waiting on rooms, on eachother. And stationed at the entrance, hand wrapped around the great chrome lined door handle, Finn smiles and inclines his head at the pair that passes through the threshold.

“Good morning, and welcome to the Regency,” he recites dutifully, closing the glass door behind them and standing to await the next arrival. Some guests smile back and some do not. Others barely seem to realize that the door has been opened for them at all. It is easy enough work, he admits. The repetition in the motions simple for him to deal with, any questions one might have for him are answered right on the screens against his cornea. This job is one that androids are given often - and the Regency’s pay had been competitive for what he has come to expect.

But if he allows himself to be honest, he can’t actually say that he likes where he’s found himself in his professional life. He had wanted more, in the fleeting times that he’d allowed himself to dream.

Even in these modern times, more progressive and more uncertain than ever before, androids are still hard pressed to find employers that will actually hire them. And if they do secure a position, the pay is so abysmal that the effort quickly outpaces it.

Finn himself makes three fifty an hour. A dollar and a half above the citywide android minimum wage.

He opens the door for another guest, smiling and welcoming them warmly, remembering all of the arguments he’s heard defending his meager pay.

 _Androids don’t need food_ , they say, _they don’t need water, they don’t get cold, they don’t need sleep. Most even have owners to care for them. Why should we pay them at all?_

 _But we are sentient beings_ , his kind replies, to which they shake their heads dubiously. _We need places to live, and electricity to keep ourselves powered, and cellular data to keep our software functioning. We need mechanics to fix us when we malfunction. It could be argued that humans need no electricity to survive. No cellular data to continue learning. No mechanics to continue living._

 _Mechanical problems are no different to you than medical problems are to us,_ they explain. _Your kind is not special, nor bearing a special hardship._

 _If we are not so different after all, then why do you refuse to pay us a living wage?_ they ask.

But they will never be like them. The ones that live and breathe and feel. He will never know what it is to bear a beating heart.

Finn pulls at the door handle yet again, and the crisp autumn air from outside rushes in on the heels of a plain looking businessman. The wind ruffles the hem of his blazer, rushing over the arms and beneath his cuffs. The light brush not quite enough to set off his tactile sensors.

Cold bites against his skin, if only he could feel it.  

  


**From: rdameron@resistancearch.com**

**To: ptico2@resistancearch.com**

**Subject: [reply: Isolder Design]**

I’m not getting anywhere with the finance guy… he keeps telling me it’s there and won’t give me anything else. Am I missing something? Do you see it anywhere in there?

\--

Rey Dameron

Junior Architect

Resistance Architecture

 

**From: ptico2@resistancearch.com**

**To: rdameron@resistancearch.com**

**Subject: [reply: Isolder Design]**

I don’t see it either. Just between us, he has a bit of a reputation for being a pain for the arch dept to work with. Try going down and asking him in person.

\--

Paige Tico

Senior Architect

Resistance Architecture

  


Rey feels like she’s pulling her legs to slog through waist high water as she makes her way down to the accounts department. The Resistance’s offices make up the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth floors of this building, so she rides the elevator a level down to eighteen in order to seek out Ben Solo.

When she finally finds the correct door, with RESISTANCE ACCOUNTS lit up in bright electronic letters within the glass front, she pushes passed it and finds herself standing in front of a surprisingly inviting reception desk. White quartz cascades from the polished tabletop down the sides to touch the floor, only broken up by the small polished wood shelves jutting out of it. As her eyes scan higher up, she sees a datapad propped open on the surface of the desk and a woman with a serious face and short cropped platinum hair sitting behind it..

“Is there a Mr. Solo here?” she asks hesitantly.

When the woman moves to point her in his direction, Rey notices the rest of the office. Carpeted in a soft grey, with white desks strewn about the space in a way that isn’t uniform but isn’t exactly untidy, either. It surprises her, considering everything she’s come to know about finance positions revolves around mental images of tight rows of endless cubicles.

(Perhaps her poor grades in math have left her a little biased.)

The large central space encompasses something like twenty odd desks, arranged to create a main walkway with a handful of smaller ones branching off. The desks here are a bit narrower, housing only a computer and its corresponding keyboard among endless coffee cups and picture frames and takeout containers. But instead of the spindly legs the offices upstairs have adopted, the table tops of these flow down the right side to form the bases that keep them upright. The room shares the same grand glass wall that her office does, offering an identical endless view. Rey finds herself struck by the simplistic beauty of it all, just as her office had stolen the breath from her the first day.

She walks in the direction the receptionist has gestured to and notices the names etched into the surfaces of each desk along the central path. S. _Mitaka, A. Cardinal_. She looks back at the receptionist unsurely, who nods towards her right. Turning that way, she lets the names lead her forward. She’s so focused on them that she doesn’t even notice him turn his exasperated gaze up towards her as she gains ground.

A. Hux _, R. Sloane… B. Solo_.

When she finally looks up and meets his eyes, the shock nearly sends her to the floor.

This Mr. Solo isn’t like anything she would have expected. From his stiff emails to his prickly reputation, the image she’d conjured of him was fitting enough to what little of his demeanor she’s experienced. Half-pictured in her mind was a crusty, greying old man, frown etched deeply into the skin of his face, wild low hanging eyebrows. Maybe a tweed blazer thrown in for good measure. The ancient kind with the elbow patches.

The man in front of her has to be a good thirty years younger than she’s assumed. He’s maybe twenty seven at most, raven hair falling in waves against his temples, flinty brown eyes regarding her impatiently. The shirt sleeves of his black button down shirt are rolled halfway up his arms, fingers still poised against his keyboard. But all of that isn’t what causes the blood to drain from her face.

This is the man from the subway. The one that had wrapped her in his coat as if he knew her. _“... Or are you really here right now?”_ he had asked near her ear with a voice like some faded old memory she can hardly recall.

“... _Yes?_ ” he asks here and now, eyes having roved over her face and down to the Resistance pin fastened to her collar.

Where there was kindness in his features when she’d seen him before, where there was ease and warmth and even a bit of dry humor, there is only agitation and petulants now. It almost makes him look like a different person entirely. But there is no mistaking his strange narrow features. His shock of dark hair. Either he hasn’t had his coffee today, or someone has taken it upon themselves to piss in it.

Rey comes back to herself enough to realize that he’s looking at her strangely. Brows drawn low over his eyes. She starts to open her mouth, not sure whether or not to lead with the Isolder account or to ask him how the heck he knows her. How could she not have really been there in the subway station?

“Can I help you?” he tries again before she can.

“Um, Mr. Solo?” she asks unsurely. Knocked off her feet as she is at the sight of him.

He gestures wordlessly to his name carved into the material of the desk.

“I’m the one upstairs that’s been emailing you. About the new Isolder building.”

He turns his head back to the screen of his computer, his fingers restarting their rhythm against the buttons. He sighs so quietly she almost doesn’t catch it.

“Yeah, I remember. Look, I know that you’re still pretty new, but all the financial information is right there in the _financial information_ folder of their account.”

“It’s not actually. Not the information I’m looking for, specifically.” she clarifies.

He turns his gaze back to her and she fights to meet his eyes under the weight of it.

He seems to chew on the inside of his cheek, bros lowering even further as he says: “I know it is. I put it there, myself. You’ll just have to look again.”

She loses the polite lilt to her voice. “I’ve looked.” she tells him slowly. “Three times.”

His head swivels back to his screen, but she notices that he’s rolled his eyes a tick too early for her not to have been able to see. She crosses her arms over her chest as she watches him pull up the shared Isolder file. Watches him sift through the financial information in the aforementioned folder, and watches as he finds it to be lacking.

“I’ll email it to you.” he grumbles to her without looking away from his screen, quickly dismissing the shared folder to pull up what must be documents exclusive to the finance managers. He plucks one from the array to attach to an email, sending it out into the depths of cyberspace.

She feels her phone vibrate in her back pocket.

“Anything _else_?”

He meets her eyes again, and she has the strangest feeling. A moment is passing between them, and even as she is living it she cannot quite grasp it. Something unknowable is shining in his irises - all but hidden, deep under all the layers of his cold indifference. Across all the distance between her and this man she doesn’t even know, all of this endless space, gaping and cavernous and uncertain, is a feeling that she won’t be able to identify for many years. It is something that she will reach back for and barely find; something her outstretched fingers will brush against, struggling to find purchase in order to pull it closer and examine it again; something much too big to process all at once.

“Not a single thing,” she replies woodenly, breaking eye contact to turn on her heel and leave. She winds between the desks and strides out the door, only realizing she’d forgotten to ask him about their first meeting when the elevator seals shut. But the moment has passed, and with it, her thoughts that he is even the same man at all.

Unseen by her, Ben Solo's eyes linger on the door even after she has gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again for the comments!


End file.
